


Loose Ends

by RainofLittleFishes



Series: Beloved of Him, She Inherits Sorrow [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ancestors, Closure, Disciple POV, First Love, Funerary Rites, Just Kidding – Nuns Never Retire, Kick Ass Warrior Nun in Retirement Years, The Heretical Cult of Calliope, The Power of Literacy, The Summoner's Rebellion, premeditated murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-01
Updated: 2016-01-01
Packaged: 2018-05-10 20:16:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5599414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are old, and he is not, and so many that you loved have gone before.<br/>There is a chance, there is a chance that the world your beloved told you was there, just beyond reach, is within reach now.<br/>(This is foolish.)<br/>((You don't have much time left anyhow.))</p><p>...He never changed his door codes.</p><p> </p><p>(This story can stand alone.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loose Ends

**Author's Note:**

> I did not expect this verse to continue... but here is a thing. You don't need to read them in order.

Here is a secret: when you were young, and still deaf to all but your captors, you had a lover, also young, but properly purple as any, holy to your unholy, and you still do not know where the edges were, where your love was or was not real, how much he valued you, what he thought, if it mattered.

Were you a pet?

A distraction?

A brief doomed love, tolerated because as warm as you were, you came with an expiration date?

 _When I was a child, I played with childish things, but now that I am an adult I put them away_.

(I put them _down_.)

If nothing else, at least you were as purified as a lowblood might be, raised as you were to the outer mysteries.

Sometimes when the light of sundown strikes just so, you are a wiggler again, in the church aisle, scrubbing in the Devotions of the Blank Page in preparation for the Revelations of Mirth. You learned to write in the church, not because the church found you worthy, but because your first lover did. It was an odd thing for a flush lover to demand of you, closer to pale to demand such improvements, and you seldom used the gift with him. As common as it was (is) for a highblood to have a warm piece on the side, it has always been unwise to flaunt such potential weaknesses. Since you left, were tempted away, _stole yourself free_ , you had turned that gift from your first flush lover to serving your true family, your chosen family, and the irony is not beyond you.

Maybe you _were_ a joke to Kurloz.

But to the mirthful, that's not really a joke at all.

If this were a true secret, no others would know. But perhaps it is becoming a secret again as they go, Kankri first, then Mituna to his hellish fate and Porrim to hers. Who knows if he survives within his prison? (Is it better to be dead and fled or to live yet within such hell? You know what you would favor, but you have always been faster to strike than Kankri was.) So perhaps now it is just two again, two who remember the secret, the secrets, of an unknowing slave girl and her privileged master, now an old crone and a purple in his very prime, at the height of the power available to any below violet.

Funny that. In all this time, he hasn't changed his door code calculation formulas, for all that they change daily. It's almost like he's inviting you in. (And maybe he is. Who else knew but you? Who else now would brave the sundown to get the jump on a troll that could as easily squash them barehanded as dirty his strifekind with traitorblood?)

 _Funny_ , you promise Calliope, the sacred other name of the duality still deliciously heretical in your mind, even after years of all sorts of violation of church doctrine. _Funny_ , you promise her, _an ancient olive walks up to a purple in his prime…_ and calls him out for the murder of her true love, the one who filled all her quadrants when he could only fill the one, and that clandestinely. No. It’s not really a revenge murder, is it? If it was, then you would have been long dead of it at some prior time. It’s… It’s tying up loose ends, not Kankri’s but this beautiful, fragile rebellion’s. (It’s a strike for an older murder, that of your lusus in the proving grounds, on the night when the moons hide their faces and wigglers die.)

Without the Grand Highblood, the church will fall into chaos, his very strength used against them now, as the sects cooperating only under his iron fist and steely eye compete to make their own doctrines the only One.

That is another joke. There has never been only One. There has always been at least two, though Calliope’s worship has been forbidden long enough that most of the wigglers don’t know anything of her. Oh the secrets you learned in the church’s deep and dusty archives, under the blank flickering gazes of candle-filled skulls. (The secrets you learned sitting in the strong embrace of his arms, sounding out letters on trollskin, dead trolls talking. Dead trolls that would never truly be gone until all that follow were. It was a type of magic entirely free of the secrets of blood, and you did not know it, but it was a key to your cage. It was your strifekind against the spectrum, sweeps later, sweeps since.)

It is a good night to die.

There's plenty of company on the other side, and you may yet bring some with you. You do not love Kurloz, not anymore, not as lovers do, or ought, but Kankri taught you compassion, or let you find it for yourself, and you can hate the Grand Highblood and also platonically pity the child he once was, reared by the same church as you were, even if it showed him a kinder face. They are all masks. You can pity the loss of his innocence even if he does not, and you can pity the trolls that he will yet strike down and try to spare them.

You ready his quarters for his arrival.

You never changed your strifekind, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t pick up a few tricks in the past sweeps. You are no longer fast, or strong, or even possessing much in the way of stamina. You _are_ enduring, for you have endured. And you are patient, because you are old, and there are physical limits to your body that your mind, however agile, can only compensate for so far.

So when the coldblood-specific poison drops him, you are ready with your claws, but you do not strike before you must. If he seems likely to call for help, you will, but he is still strong enough to kill you, and you cannot allow that, not before you are assured that no last minute rescue awaits.

You did not fully expect it to work, even as he falls, he looks to you, eyes already closing, and his arm reaches for you, twice the length of your own, and you stay well back from his reach, but you do not flee.

 _“Meulin_ ,” says a voice like the first pebbles of a rockslide.

 _“They stole you.”_ And the rumble threatens to rise.

 _“I stole myself.”_ You say it more gently than necessary, there are no active communication or surveillance devices in his suite, his closest neighbors are floors away.

It is something that Porrim said once, about culling grubs, about cradling even the doomed ones before the cull. _No one should die alone._ Her voice was steady, it was always steady, but you had known suddenly, with a terrible clarity, how she chose her title. Psii had huffed then, a bitter laugh to hide the horrors he had seen, was even then feeling, and Kankri had reached for him. _No one should have to live alone_ , your loadstone had said, and his hand on Mituna’s cheek was tender-pale and tender-flush and Mituna hadn’t flinched away, not anymore, hadn’t for a while. You had painted the two of them not long after, added him and him to him and us, him and her, him and you. Four of you, and none in any perfectly cordoned quadrant.

You haven’t heard from Psii since he was taken. He told you once that a young purple had inspected him for a church ship, sweeps before he would have been installed, had offered him the strangest of diamonds if he agreed to a bit of subterfuge in the following perigees of testing. It was a quiet recollection, and if the horns and paint, the stance and first title were ones you recognized, it was only odd that you should have left him so far behind to find him still, that another he so… courted would run from him and into your own arms. The codes that Kurloz once snuck wiggler Mituna let him game the tests long enough to escape. Surely Calliope laughed then.

Kurloz’s arm falls lax, fingers with their deadly talons still pointed in your direction, curling up. His eyes are still open, not yet flat. His chest still rises, but slowly. You make the strike quickly, and the blades are sharp, so that even if he is aware enough to feel it, it does not last long. It is a better death than those he dealt. Kurloz always loved drawing such things out, he liked the chase, the fear, even, especially, when his victims had nowhere _to_ run. It did not bother you once, you did not let it bother you, but _it is the inherent right of all trolls to grow_. He grew stronger, but still bent to the church’s mold. You grew free of it.

Your beloved consoled compassion, and it is your beloved that holds your allegiance, even so long dead. Before you go, you wash Kurloz’s face, and under the paint, under the sweeps that passed, you still recognize the sweep of his brows, the bones of his cheeks, the prominence of his nose. Without the danger of his mind, finding evidence of your long ago lover brings water to your eyes. You gave him up a long time ago, but it would seem that you were not quite done mourning.

You comb his hair out, reveal his ears, always strangely elegant in contrast to his muscled force, the brutality he favored so that other faithful forgot the mind behind it.

You untangle the little trophy bones from who knows whom, leaving only the bits of braid, the dreadlocks and locking beads. You recognize one such, know that inside lies a lock of your own hair, still black if it has not since rotted, and something in your throat tightens, still unknowing if he kept it to tally your betrayal or if it was a remembrance. He has other such ornamented beads, and surely he cannot have been alone since, not with the sweeply drones and his prominence. But you know the church like a daily daymare, and you wonder if he had ever trusted since.

He is heavy and you are old, but you undress him, clean the indignities of death, and re-dress him. It takes a long time. He was a large troll, and it is beyond your means to lift him so that the blood drains faster. You are patient. You clean your blades when you are done.

When they find the body, there will be outrage at such defilement, the insult of his bared face. You wonder how many will remember that Calliope accepts all comers, and asks only for _the face without lies, the unmasked truth_. Perhaps that will tear them further apart in a search for such heretics.

It’s the Dark Moons Carnival and the church is emptier than usual, soldiers dispersed not for the Condesce’s will but for the collecting. It may be nights before any dare to intrude upon the scene. You do not think of the children who are being hunted even now for you must concentrate to make your clean escape.

You leave the way you came, slowly, patiently, and no one stops you, nothing bars your way. You have not met the Handmaid last night or tonight, though you invited her, feasted and feted her. That one is never sated, but perhaps she too has a sense of humor.

You make it all the way back to your contacts, back to the rebellion, you nod to Sorrow, and she nods back, and goes away to best take advantage of your gift of time, and a flurry of rebels descend upon you, weak little old olive legend that you are. You pat hands and accept water and food, and pretend not to hear their speculations of your senility. You told them that you needed to hunt under the waning moons. You never told them what.

You lean back against a pack, and close your eyes, let your exhaustion encourage your attendants to move along with the impending sun, but you do not sleep, not yet. One of the strange vagaries of age, of your age at least, is the need for less sleep. You cannot walk so far, or strike so fast, but in your last sweeps, time stretches oddly, now fast, blink and wigglers grow to adults, now slow, days that never end.

(You remember the softest rumble of his chucklevoodoos, tightly leashed into little frissons that pattered up your spine and horns like another gentle flush touch, and not the weapon they were to all others. It made you shiver, and you were so outclassed, by his power, by his gentleness to you, by his very right to your blood and body, that you adored him, when to all others you turned another face. Dutiful adherent. Fierce hunter. Under his protective (possessive) mantle, you turned away others who ought to have had such rights, for even then he was terror enough to enforce his own. You loved him. Surely he must have pitied you to so protect you, to so enforce his own boundaries to your body and mind, even if he did not understand that any could want more. _Surely_ , you told yourself, and _still you do not know_.)

You do not sleep, until you do, and you dream, not of your beloved, but your first love, and the opening of the books are the unlocking of a great cage, the dust rising from them are lowblood ghosts murmuring of warmblood freedom.

There are long-fingered hands in your long and dark hair, and he is braiding in a lock of his own hair, a thin circlet of a ring to match the design locking you own coiled braid into his thick mane.

When you left the church, you cut the lock out, and would have thrown it away but that The Dolorosa caught it up, extricated the thin band, and smiled, a terrible thin blade of triumph, still less trusting of you than Kankri, though almost anyone would have qualified for that. “ _What happens when you’ve been gone too long?”_ she had asked, clinically, still not fond of you, popping the tiny catch to reveal the circuits of a homing device. You had been numb then, but Kankri smiled in mischief and goaded you into tying the ring to a sleeping hoofbeast’s tail, almost getting the both of you trampled in the process. Perigees later you had pulled the same trick for Psii’s tracker, though his had to be cut from flesh, and you had fed it directly to a likely predator. Sweeps later Psii had found you on the rosters of the dead, listed as _AWOL, presumed consumed_ …

You sleep, or something like it.

Kurloz’s fingers in your hair were gentle, and when he was done he had rested his hands on your shoulders. He could have easily wrapped them around your neck. He was always gentle with you. Deadly to others of the church. Calm and unmoved among the other lowbloods. Demanding and possessive of your time in a way you now associate with wigglers not yet grown, trolls as yet uncertain. _Look at me. Look at me, and see me. _He told you once that his lusus left him early, so you do not know where he learned this gentleness, except that Porrim and Kankri were right and trolls are by nature peaceable and by nurture violent.

You did the right thing.

Calliope cradle you all.


End file.
